Sometimes, I just sit down and type and see what happens. . . . And in this case, a novel happened.

Daniel Wallace grew up in Birmingham and graduated from The Altamont School in 1977. (Photo by Roger Haile)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -– For his fifth novel, “The Kings and Queens of Roam,” Birmingham native and “Big Fish” author Daniel Wallace has imagined yet another extraordinary fantasy world filled with odd and colorful souls -- both living and dead, tragic and comic.

This time, the place is an old textile town that, as Wallace writes, “felt like the abandoned capital of an ancient civilization: still a wonder to behold, out here in the middle of nowhere, but worn down, broken, nearly empty.’’

Roam is home to the sisters Rachel and Helen McCallister, the great-granddaughters of the greedy town founder Elijah McCallister, who built Roam on the promise of making “the finest silk the world had ever known.”

Rachel, the younger sister, is as naïve as she is beautiful, while Helen, the older sister, is as deceitful as she is ugly.

Rachel, though, is also blind, and Helen tricks her younger sister into thinking that she is the hideous one and that she cannot possibly survive in the dark and dangerous world without her big sister.

Haunted by the ghosts of its past, the little town of Roam is teeming with tall tales to be told, and the inventive Wallace is, of course, right at home telling them.

“I like to have a voice that you can distinguish from other voices and stories that you can distinguish from other stories,” Wallace says in a phone call. “So I exaggerate.

“My idea of a story is one where the world is exactly what we live in every day, except it is stranger, brighter or darker, smaller or bigger that it actually is.”

On Wednesday, “The Kings and Queens of Roam” book tour brings Wallace back to Birmingham, where he grew up and where he graduated from The Altamont School in 1977. He will sign copies of his new book at the Alabama Booksmith in Homewood beginning at 4 p.m.

The opening sentence to the book came to Wallace about eight years ago, he says, while he was still immersed in writing his fourth novel, “Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician.”

“Rachel McCallister and her sister, Helen, lived together in they grew up in, and as far as anyone could tell (Rachel and Helen included), this is where they would die as well,” he wrote.

The words sat there for a while but they stuck around, and over time, Wallace kept coming back to them.

“Sometimes, I just sit down and type and see what happens,” Wallace says. “Sometimes a story happens, and in this case, a novel happened. It just took a while to figure out what that novel was.

“Even during the course of writing ‘Mr. Sebastian,’ I would take breaks and go back to that sentence,” he goes on. “Actually, I was able to write that whole first paragraph, the paragraph that is in the book as it stands now. So I had a paragraph, and it suggested something.”

Having three sisters of his own, Wallace says, helped him develop the complex bond entwines the sisters Rachel and Helen in his book.

“There are autobiographical elements in every book, even one as kind of fabulistic as this one,” Wallace says. “It’s hard to invent that kind of sisterly relationship.

“The dependency that you see, especially as sisters grow older, there is a very complicated relationship where there is a dependency and perhaps some jealousy.”

Two deaths in the family

While Wallace was writing “The Kings and Queens of Roam,” he lost two members of his immediate family – his mother, Joan, who lived here in Birmingham, died about three years ago, and one of his sisters, Holly, died in 2011.

View full size"The Kings and Queens of Roam" is Wallace's fifth novel.

Their deaths, Wallace says, took the book down an unexpected path.

“I had a number of people in my life die,” he says. “There are a lot of ghosts in this book, and those ghosts didn’t start to appear until all of those people started to die.”

Wallace, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., with his wife, Laura, has taught in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina for about 10 years.

Teaching, he says, reinforces his writing.

“Oh, absolutely, it does,” Wallace says. “When you are teaching students, you get to talk about the fundamentals of writing. And sometimes you forget what those fundamentals are in your own work. So it makes my work better.”

'Big Fish' goes to Broadway

This fall, Wallace is planning a trip to New York, where the new “Big Fish” musical -- based on his 1998 book and the 2003 Tim Burton film adaption -- will open at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway on Sept. 5.